PHQ Miners stuck on "searching for resources"

[jpmmart17]

Weird issue I'm having. When I set the miners to "sector automine" they immediately mine and fill up their storage as normal, but when I assign them to my PHQ commander as a miner in the same sector they wander aimlessly with their command stuck on "searching for resources". In both cases they needed to mine Ore and/or Ice.

TLDR: why can my miners find resources instantly on sector automine, but seem to be unable to find any when assigned to a station commander to automine?

[Wraith]

Is there a buy order for the resource?
If there isn’t the miners won’t mine

[jpmmart17]

Originally posted by Wraith:

Is there a buy order for the resource?
If there isn’t the miners won’t mine

There is an a buy offer in the trade wares menu, which I assume means there's a buy order, but an error message finally popped up that said "no matching trade offers found".

[Wraith]

A screenshot of your logistical menu with the resource you want mined expanded will help.
Because there are multiple way this could go wrong and seeing a screenshot is way faster then guessing.

also make sure your manager have money (which is weird since he need money to buy resource from your miners even if he doesn't use it)

[craigb]

I'm having the same problem. I've had nothing but mining/station problems for weeks.

Sorry it's a long post not elegantly written, but it might help.

I have separated out mining of each resource into one station for each. (more than one gas or mineral, at a station, caused me headaches).
For each resource, each station manager, can to some degree keep my miners working correctly. (All my station managers are trained to level 4 and all my L mining ships are at least level 3 pilots)

However, for Helium this stopped working recently:

For Helium, the station manager sends the ships to antigone memorial or frontiers edge.
At both places, the ships go to the edge of the helium cloud area, don't find the helium and try at the other sector mentioned. i.e. they yoyo between the 2 areas never mining anything. I believe this is because they have mined the edge dry.
I took control of one of the L ships and worked out where the helium was and wasn't, by manually flying around with the mining drones set to mine only helium.

So I added extra resource probes, to point out to the station manager/pilots where helium is/ is not. This didn't work, they still flew to the edge of both sector clouds, finding and mining nothing.

So then I entered each ships behaviour command to mine helium at sector whatever and clicked the exact spot of where I wanted the ship to mine. This worked.
However, continually telling each ship the exact spot in a cloud to mine is annoying.

If I remove the ships from being station managed, and let the pilots mine and sell to the station, no issues.
However, these pilots are level 4 and can be controlled mostly on expert mining settings.
I have found pilot level matters somewhat, just not sure how much. Its been a long few weeks of station building, station redesign, ship building, pilot training and trial and error.

Basically, use blacklists, don't let station managers control anything. No ships, no storage allocation, nothing.
And set every station resource very carefully. I manually set everything - how much cargo space, buying amount, buying price, who can sell the resource to the station. Same with selling settings.

My biggest headache has actually been the voids hazardous regions. creating blacklists and placing nav beacons, resource probes, using only L ships worked mostly. But even now I still lose the odd destroyer. At least I don't lose mining ships though.
Before I had L ships, I used M miners. As soon as any ship went rogue and mined in the void, it destroyed itself in the hazardous region. Constantly policing this, even though I had blacklists, was a nightmare.

Don't forget to keep an eye on mining drones. If these become destroyed, you mine nothing with an L ship. (protecting each L miner with anything smaller than a destroyer resulted in lost mining drones).
And no I have never managed to get these to auto restock drones at the L equip doc, I built.
I recently built an XL supply ship. I think the ships are restocking drones at this ship when it is in the same sector. (still to confirm this)
The supply ship assigned to the XL commander however, does absolutely nothing. It never restocks anything on my XL ship. I'm working on that issue.
At the minute I periodically tell the XL ship to restock itself, takes a few minutes, but at least that works. Would be nice if its supply trader ship actually woke up and did something, but never mind.

Hope this helps save you the weeks of trial and error, I've had.
Hopefully someone more experienced can describe the perfect setup